Revenue Management and the Internet

Within the hospitality industry, there is an ongoing revolution. Internet marketing and revenue management is increasingly overlapping. In fact, is now almost impossible to think about yield management without considering online hotel sales. For this reason, hotel revenue managers need to find how the two disciplines will evolve in the future in order to anticipate it.

In today’s challenging environment, travelers are becoming budget-conscious. One of the most popular mediums they look into is the internet. However, simply classifying the online marketplace as the “internet” is not sufficient. There are so many things that are involved in strategizing it. For example, some hotels focus too much resource on creating their website and home page. Meanwhile, others try to increase their web presence through SEO even as the content of their site suffers.

To find out the best strategy you can use for this hotel electronic sales channel, it is important to know your target market. If your target customers frequent one particular forum, for instance, then placing advertisement within that site might be a good idea. On the other hand, if they are more likely to type “Budget Hotels Florida” on the search engines, then optimizing your web pages using effective search engine optimization techniques is highly adviced.

Another strategy is to get into the Web 2.0 or even Web 3.0 phenomenon today. Social networking, social bookmarking, and other user-generated websites are popular among virtually all internet users. This is because they trust the opinions of their peers more than they do the brochure of the company. No matter what market you’re targeting, getting links and positive reviews from these websites will be very helpful.

And of course, there are the travel portals. Depending on the rate of the hotel, some properties shy away from these sites while some use it as an important medium to increase RevPAR and improve hotel sales. Some shy away because of the cut these travel portals get every time a guest books a room from the site. The commissions can sometimes be rather high. Sometimes, certain hotels can ill-afford to give it. If your main concern at this point is promotion and brand image though, this should be considered as an investment rather than a cost because of the potential it brings.